25 January 2010
By Raza Naeem
Yemen was a
chessboard for both Ottoman and British empires in the
19th century, the latter occupying Aden in the south
and the former becoming dominant in the North. Prior
to this, it had remained one of the oldest ancient
undivided states along with Egypt, Persia and China.
After the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, a feudal
anachronistic imamate took hold in the North which
ruled with an iron hand sanctioned by the hammer of
the Zaidi sect. The British
consolidated their rule in the south of the country,
using a vicious pacification campaign which involved
the use of mustard gas. A Free Yemen movement began to
take shape in the North in the 1930s demanding an end
to the imamocracy, a more liberal rendition of Islam
and a greater opening to the outside world. The
rumblings continued and in 1948 a radical alliance of
the constitutionalist movement and peasants came out
on the streets, profiting from the imam’s
assassination. The old order quickly reconstituted
itself, though the resistance continued and the
contradictions between the rulers and the ruled made
an old-style classic revolution to displace the
Bourbons of Yemen imperative. In a palace revolution
that was to shake not only the feudal order in the
Arab East buttressed by the al-Sauds in Riyadh but
also British colonialism in the region, nationalist
military officers inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser
overthrew the hated imam in the north in September
1962, thus completing a remarkable hat-trick of
revolutions in the Arab world within a decade – Egypt
(1952), Iraq (1958) and Yemen. It was natural that
such intransigence against the moribund old order in
Sana’a would not go unpunished, especially after the
revolutionary contagion in the north infected the
south, where a full-scale guerilla war - one section
of the revolutionaries loyal to the Nasserists while
the other, more radical Marxist-Leninist wing inspired
by the Cuban, Chinese and Palestinian struggles –
erupted in 1963, complemented by a militant trade
union movement. Those who would
hurriedly dismiss Yemen as a stronghold of beards and
burqas would do well to study this revolutionary
upheaval in the heart of feudal Arabia which shattered
all previous stereotypes about desert societies
floating on a sea of oil with passive and benighted
citizenries bought off by decades of oil largesse (so
lyrically analyzed by the bard of all Gulf Arab
novelists Abdel Rahman Munif in his ‘Cities of Salt’
quartet). In a
counter-revolutionary aggression reminiscent of the
tripartite onslaughtn by Britain, France and Israel
against Nasser in 1956, the Yemeni revolutionaries
were ranged against another foreign alliance
comprising monarchical
Saudi Arabia, Iran and Britain and initially,
Israel. That Nasser, who had by then become a veteran
of Zionist and British conspiracies to unseat him,
supported the guerilla struggle in south Yemen with a
commitment of 70,000 troops (until his own forces were
called away and then defeated in the catastrophic 1967
Arab-Israeli war) did much to bolster this most
radical of Arab revolutionary forces. The popularity of the
People’s Wars in the north and south forced British
withdrawal from the south in November 1967 and victory
for republican forces in the north in July 1970. At
one stroke, one of the oldest feudal orders in the
Arab east had been dismantled, alerting pasha, emir
and colonel to the need for vigilance if they weren’t
to lose their own caps and crowns. While the north
soon reverted to a military- populist regime typical
of other radical Arab regimes and in confrontation
with socialist guerillas opposed to them, it was in
the south that the revolution was really consolidated,
first by the newly victorious guerillas of the
National Liberation Front and from 1978, as the Yemeni
Socialist Party (YSP). Analogies of south
Yemen as the Cuba of the Arab east were not
far-fetched as the new revolutionary regime set about
emancipating women, distributing land to the peasants,
nationalizing the nascent industries and eliminating
illiteracy and disease. The revolution in south Yemen
astonishingly instituted the greatest popular
participation and the most radical political and
social program of reforms, more than all the radical
colonels in Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus, Tripoli and
Sudan put together. However because it was
a popular-revolutionary regime rather than a
populist-military one like its other Arab
counterparts, the radical reforms of the south Yemeni
revolutionary regime were quarantined and checked from
one side by harsh opposition from the
counter-revolutionary north and conservative Saudi
Arabia on one hand and its dependence on the Soviet
Union on the other. Added to that the consistent
ideological and personal battles between the
leadership of the YSP and the leaders in power in Aden
ate away whatever revolutionary gains had been made in
this tiny Arab revolutionary outpost. By the 1990s there was
no real ideological difference between the regimes in
power in Sana’a and Aden, and this difference
reflected the general turn in the Arab world towards
family dictatorships or monarchies in thrall to
Washington and tamed by Tel Aviv. Still the threat of
a communist Arab state amidst a sea of dictators and
autocrats alarmed the Saudis, especially in the
aftermath of another revolutionary upheaval in Tehran
in 1979. Therefore with Saudi money and blessings, the
unification of Yemen was brought about in 1990.
Although the
unification snuffed out the only real revolutionary
alternative in the post-1967 Arab world, it was hoped
that the former in the form of a new democratic state
would enable a hitherto passive citizenry in the
petrol stations of the Gulf to put pressure on their
own autocrats. Not to be. Since the unification, Yemen
itself has become a byword for the same malaise
afflicting the Arab world which the revolution and
then the unification was intended to solve – a
personalistic family owned dictatorship under
president Ali Abdullah Saleh. An attempted secession
of a disgruntled south in 1994 was dealt with an iron
hand. The pacification of the south meant extending
Northern control over southern property, British
colonial villas in Aden and southern trade. The
Salehization of the whole country has also meant that
whereas once women used to work and move around the
streets of the south unveiled, the beards have once
again taken over. This is a legacy of the ugly
compromises the Saleh kleptocracy has made with the
religious Islah Party in order to keep the YSP out of
the power structure. What is really
happening in Yemen today is the unfolding of
unfinished historical baggage from Yemeni unification.
The Huthi uprising in the north is led by former
allies of Saleh who were used as mercenaries in the
reconquest of the south in 1994 and have now fallen
out with the ruling elite. Far from being a religious
revolt, the aim of the rebellion in the north is not
the establishment of a Zaidi/Islamic heavenly kingdom
on earth as the alarmist media would have us believe;
in fact what started as an old-fashioned bar-room
brawl over resources and political influence has now
taken on greater proportions because of Saleh’s
vicious military campaigns against the rebels,
midwifed since last year by the US and now by its
chief proxy in the peninsula, Saudi Arabia, whose
interventions in the country (as everywhere else) have
always been self-serving and expansionist. The revolt in the
south mainly comprises former socialist military
officers who have seen what little revolutionary gains
they fought for in the revolution dismantled by the
grotesque combination of military officers and clerics
imported from the north (and quite possibly Riyadh).
So what are the alternatives? Saleh, unlike Musharraf,
Saddam Hussein and the Taliban is a wily dictator who
has managed to keep power only by juggling amongst US,
Saudi and his own interests on one hand and by doling
out oil money to buy off a pliant opposition on the
other. Of course what has also helped is the ease with
which a passive civil society has accepted the
neoliberal programs shoved down their throats by the
aging dictator. But that hasn’t
stopped people from taking risks. Jarallah Omar, the
charismatic and courageous former secretary-general of
the YSP, was assassinated a few years ago for
advocating an end to capital punishment. However
moth-eaten and isolated from the people the aging
leaders of the YSP (like Ali Salim al-Bidh, former
president of the south and now in exile in
Oman) have become, one thing is sure: Yemen is a
country where memory of revolution and resistance
remains fresh. The mood in the old
socialist south remains especially militant: just two
months ago thousands of people came out in the streets
in Aden to commemorate the anniversary of the British
withdrawal, which quickly became a protest against the
misery of the present. The rebellions in both the
north and the south, are thus a continuation of the
old revolutionary movements in the 1950s and 1960s
which shook the British empire and forces of reaction;
and like the struggles of old, they have no truck with
religion. Only a jaundiced vision would fail to see
them as such and ascribe to them the views of a
fanatical minority. For the rebellions reflect not
only a sharp memory of the country’s revolutionary
history but also a desire for a break with whatever
the unification entailed – much of which hasn’t been
tangible to the people at large. Such is the history
which Yemen’s would-be occupiers in Washington and
their equally spineless satraps in Sana’a and Riyadh
want to deny and whitewash, acts which are not serving
them well in the occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As one of the songs of the revolutionary wolves of
Radfan (the south Yemeni Yunan) from the early 1970s
reminds us: ‘We must support
the workers, We must support the
peasants, We must support the
fishermen, And the Bedouin and
nomads We must eliminate
illiteracy We must liberate women
We must arm the women
And we must eliminate
illiteracy!’ It would be comforting
to believe that such infectious enthusiasm extends
equally towards combating foreign occupation and its
hired quislings; for those who did not tolerate a
British occupation will certainly not be content with
a possible American one. --
Raza Naeem is a Pakistani national working on his PhD
in History from the University of Arkansas in the US.
He can be reached at: razanaeem@hotmail.com. Comments 💬 التعليقات |